The cliché is now established: Television rules. One of its corollaries is that the movies are finished. Why drive all the way to the multiplex, pay a small fortune for tickets, sit in a crowded cellar smelling of coconut oil and adolescents, and try to concentrate with the flashing glare of strangers checking their phones when you can relax at home for free tweeting about Breaking Bad? You know what they talk about at movie parties these days? What they saw on television last night. The cultural dominance once taken for granted by the movies has begun to wane; the prominence of television continues to swell.

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This fall, two films have appeared to challenge this new state of affairs: Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity and J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost. Both are movies that cannot be seen any other way except in the theater. Both are intense dramas of human experience outside an environment that can support human life, in space and in the middle of the Indian Ocean, respectively. Both are incredibly innovative reimaginings of the possibilities of cinema. Gravity, by the Mexico-born Cuarón, uses 3-D to offer the audience the terror of weightlessness. All Is Lost, by the New Jersey–born Chandor, is an almost entirely silent meditation on death. After a brief prologue, Robert Redford speaks, by my count, five words. You have never seen anything like either Gravity or All Is Lost, which is sort of the point of both of them.

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ESQUIRE: Do you think the movies need defending right now?

J.C. Chandor: TV right now is in a bubble. I shouldn't say bubble. Artists are taking advantage of a new model. And someday, when the other foot comes down, my guess is that a lot of these opportunities for people to do this sort of amazing original stuff that's happening in long-form storytelling with TV will disappear. The golden age is because people are taking risks, whereas traditionally television has been a very risk-averse medium because of the cost involved, at least in dramatic storytelling. I think it's a fascinating shakedown that's happening financially, but talk to a person like John Cooper at Sundance or A. O. Scott and they'll tell you there's more movies being made now than have ever been. You know, that's been pretty fascinating, too, what's been able to happen technologically to the film space. Hopefully, the act of gathering together in one space with a larger-than-life screen size and sound and everything else — I don't think that's going away any time soon. People love doing it. Film will adapt.

ESQ: All Is Lost is a very filmic film. It's not the kind of thing that you could really see outside a theater. You did that intentionally.

JC: I did Margin Call first. Margin Call did not have to be seen for greatest impact in a theater. It helps. It helps you pay attention. But if you are closely paying attention to that movie — I've had people see it on a computer screen on a plane. Some of the most emotional reactions I've had to that film were from people who saw it on planes. All Is Lost, admittedly, from the moment I conceived of it, was meant to be seen in a big old theater with big old sound.

JC: I know what that feels like. You can let yourself go to a pretty dark place.

ESQ: I thought it was the perfect way to see it. This wouldn't make sense on video.

JC: I thought of that. I thought we shouldn't create screener DVDs for the awards season. Essentially, you have to be in the theater. People should come to the movie theater to see it. That really is where it's designed to be seen. There's a bunch of movies out now that subscribe to that and realize that movies can offer you a unique experience. We called it — I don't know where it came from — an experiential action film. That's what the distributors reading this thirty-one-page draft — that's what everyone was making their financial decisions on, and Redford made his career decision on. All on this little document that certainly didn't look like a movie when you picked it up. And then luckily, when people were done reading it, they realized it's nothing but a movie. That's all it is.

ESQ: Why is it nothing but a movie?

JC: Its biggest trick is the passage of time. Where over an hour and forty minutes, you're able to feel these eight days weigh on this person and strip all his components. You have to express loneliness and boredom and moments of isolation while always keeping people engaged. For me, I was creating this swashbuckling adventure that in the third act crossed into the deepest question we face, the contemplation of our own mortality. It was essentially a procedural, but because of its lack of certain biographic and emotional detail the film could become emotionally devastating — so that you've allowed yourself to enter this character. And that, obviously, is where the Redford of it all comes in.

ESQ: It's hard to imagine Redford on television, even in the current explosion of great actors on TV.

JC: He becomes an everyman. Redford has always flirted with "Is he an everyman or is he an only man?" We're always back and forth. It's a gesture that would only work in this medium. Redford's greatest gift to this movie is that he has this ability nonverbally to communicate emotional transitions and emotional development moment by moment in a way that I can't even begin to know he's going to do. He is able to communicate hope to resilience and resilience to perseverance, to total and utter hopelessness in each little moment. It's unbelievably specific. When we were editing the movie, we were able to bring in different takes that communicate hyper-hyperspecific emotions. And that's something that just will not work as well and that you cannot achieve in a television, long-form-story format because no one's paying that close attention for that long. My film requires you to go there and for you to forget everything else in your life, which is not what I do when I'm watching television. The character is essentially mourning his own death, and he's not the kind of man who's faced that before. And that just screamed to me the grandeur that cinema can bring to a topic.

ESQ: At the same time, Breaking Bad is also about a man facing death.

JC: My goal is to take you on an intense emotional journey. You go back and look at forty hours of television, you, as an audience member, are so much in control of the process. You can leave the room. You can do other things. When you're stuck in a movie theater, there is a different level of engagement. The final episode of Breaking Bad may be one thing, but episode 7 of season 2 is a very different narrative flow than something you're expecting a person to absolutely lock into. And this film requires you to do that. Certainly, not all movies require you to do so. I do require you to fully commit. Which is really what any great film does, even the great epics like Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather, four hours long. Their power comes from these small moments, looks, and silences, along with, sure, adrenaline and joy and fear. That's what films should be doing. What they do best.

ESQ: Do you think your kids will care more for movies or television?

JC: I'm not sure our kids will know what's one or the other. You take a program like Sex and the City. Why couldn't those movies have been happening between the seasons of the show? To me, ten, fifteen years from now, that will probably be a moot point. I think there will always be epic blockbusters that are solely designed for that experience. But I think the lines are going to be blurred creatively. If I have a really successful film and I want to go make an eight-episode miniseason, I may go do that. And I could deliver that to an audience myself. I'm not a purist. It didn't drive me crazy — my ego bothered me a little bit—that Margin Call went straight to video, essentially had a one-day release. I just consider myself a storyteller, so I'm just going to choose the medium that I think best tells each particular story. But at this point in my life, the next thing I'm doing may blur that line. All Is Lost, in the purest sense of the word, is a movie. I do believe that films should stick to what they do best. That will not change, that shouldn't change.